Innovative simplified approach and numerical investigation for flow and heat transfer in internally threaded tubes

Abstract

Internally threaded tubes exhibit exceptional heat transfer capabilities, holding paramount significance in enhancing energy efficiency, reducing energy consumption, and tackling thermal challenges across aerospace, automotive, and environmental domains. Nonetheless, their intricate structural features, software modelling intricacies, extensive grid requirements, and challenges in maintaining grid quality render numerical simulation investigations a demanding endeavor. This study elucidates the influence mechanisms of thread spacing on the distribution of single-phase and two-phase flows. It delves into the condensation heat transfer of the R32 refrigerant and the single-phase heat transfer of water within internally threaded tubes. At the same Reynolds number, the heat transfer rate can be improved by approximately 19.61 % with the optimized internally threaded parameters. When the Reynolds number varies from 18,626 to 51,222, the heat transfer rate per unit length for Tube-5 remains around 2,478.9 W/m, with a variation of less than 5.19 %. Furthermore, it presents a simplified numerical simulation approach tailored for internally threaded pipes. This method manipulates wall roughness and regulates wall rotation speed to mimic fluid dynamics phenomena akin to conventional numerical simulation techniques. The findings reveal that the proposed simplified numerical simulation approach yields heat transfer and pressure drop predictions with less than 3 % discrepancies compared to traditional numerical simulation predictions. Simultaneously, compared to directly simulating threaded pipes through conventional means, this approach significantly mitigates grid generation complexities, slashing computational time costs by at least 85 % and facilitating efficient thermal design and structural optimization processes.